Lives and Letters: A Wasted Life
Carnegie, Marc
by Marc Carnegie A Wasted Life The times of Jeffrey Bernard, unwell spent. AU im low and miss" was Jeffrey Bernard's motto, one to which he adhered scrupulously in his 65 booze-soaked years....
...She "in the years 196o-1974" was his brother's lover...
...The man asked why he wasn't wearing a hat...
...If I had all the money I've spent on drink," he declared famously, "I'd spend it on drink...
...Watching those who turned out for Diana's celebrity send-off at Westminster Abbey it was hard not to conclude that, typically, he had been right on the mark...
...Soon other papers were bidding for his services, and he had more work than he could handle—at least if he was going to maintain his heroic lifestyle...
...he somewhat embarrassedly explained that, while skiing, he had seen a halfnaked woman zoom past him downhill...
...He only worked odd jobs—dishwasher, fairground boxer, stagehand, tree-cutter — and these only occasionally...
...He seduced a close friend's bride-to-be on the eve of the wedding, and broke up countless other marriages...
...advertisement in the New Statesman ask- He described his horror upon being ing if anyone could tell him where he asked by a woman, after he had seduced had been and what he had been doing her, if he knew a "Bruce Bernard...
...Not that his drinking was all that unusual at London newspapers of the sixties and seventies...
...After spending the night with one gal, he grandly announced that he might consent to stick around for lunch...
...Week after week, readers got to eavesdrop on the lives of Soho's bizarre down-and-outers — colorful characters like Mad Jack, Phil the Dustman, and No Knickers Joyce—and the even more bizarre tales of Bernard's lurching, stumbered virtually nothing, and placed an blebum life...
...Hedrank with, among others, Dylan Thomas, Brendan Behan, E.M...
...she turned him out, saying,"Thday's Tuesday...
...The Soho of the forties and fifties was something special, and dangerous—not only was homosexuality illegal, but you could still be arrested then for public drunkenness...
...Taki wrote about blondes and parties and yachts and tennis and travelling the globe...
...Soon after, knew, in dire need of a pee on the ski the paper canned him when he stood up to deliver a speech at its annual awards dinner—and then passed out onto the table...
...in absorbing the booze and hors d'oeuvres...
...Bernard died when he could no longer stand the indignity of thrice-weekly dialysis, and took himself off treatment...
...Readers of London's Spectator inevitably turned first to his "Low Life" column, which was once described as a "suicide note in weekly installments...
...Bernard fit in perfectly...
...You've got to have bottle...
...He arrived for their meeting covered in burn-holes, and when offered a platter of dainty cucumber sandwiches, said, "Excuse me, but I am an alcoholic...
...He explained One thing he had done, while cover- how he had been nicked by the police ing the race at Royal Ascot for Sporting after drunkenly assaulting a rubber plant Life, was throw up on the Queen Moth- in an Indian restaurant...
...He once drunkenly called a girlfriend and implored her to come over right away...
...Commissioned to write his autobiography some years later, he found he rememTaki Theodoracopulos...
...He also did a brief turn in the coal mines, where his comrades threatened to beat him up for being "a fookin' Tory" because he wrapped his lunch in the Times...
...The booze had atrophied his leg muscles, and he could barely walk...
...In it Bernard chronicled his epic drinking, his unending war with the fair sex, his raffish effort, as he put it, to "reach for the ground...
...He corrupted his schoolfellows by organizing masturbation races, and ran his own gambling ring...
...That's a lobster thermidor," came the reply...
...The chronic pancreatitis he had developed from an early drinking bout had become diabetes, and one week the Spectator ran this awful explanation for his column's absence: "Jeffrey Bernard has had his leg off...
...He's just barfed...
...It was, he thought, "like walking out of Bergen into Disneyland, and I've been drunk ever since...
...Bernard wrote about life at the other end of the stick...
...You should never be frightened of the sack," he said...
...By his mid-twenties he was hopelessly alcoholic...
...And he told of how a woman he He's done it...
...unfortunately she lost her footing and shot down the mountain with her pants at her ankles, leaving a tremendous golden stream in her wake...
...Only rarely did his suavity fail him...
...slopes, pulled over by some bushes and did her business there...
...His mother scrimped and borrowed to send him to private schools after her husband's death, but little Jerry—he changed his name because the lefties" were the hated Germans — would not be tamed...
...sauce...
...With Peter O'Toole as Bernard, the play became a smash hit in London, and ended up being produced in all corners of the globe...
...He shared his er...
...What if she should happen through the park, he asked...
...Bernard took Fleet Street by storm...
...His older brothers introduced him to London's bohemian Soho district, and from that point on he "never looked forward...
...Bernard detested many things—Americans, liberals, anti-smoking fascists, tax collectors, the badly-dressed, instant coffee—but most of all he detested any kind of striving...
...A stint in the King's Guards led to the first of many drunken suicide attempts, and after he went AWOL for four months, he was discharged with this evaluation: "mental stability nil...
...bosoms of the choir girls...
...And there it is...
...she was later arrested for smuggling gold and platinum, and soon after committed suicide...
...Bernard ' didn't remember that, either, and didn't care...
...even the Boy Scouts expelled him...
...For him the bottom rung of the ladder was as high up as the stars, and one of his better-known observations was that one meets a better class of people in the gutter...
...Bernard "had many wives," it was said, "four of them his own...
...Three subsequent marriages ended in divorce, but women could not resist his terrible combination of charm, looks, and self-destructiveness...
...He had been told he would die if he ever took another drink—in 1964...
...On her flight home a few days later, the hapless lady was seated in front of a man with two broken legs...
...he was too soused to realize her husband had answered the phone instead...
...The Spectator gave him the "Low Life" column, which they paired with "High Life" by the jet-setting Rather than slow his drinking, the steady income pushed it to new heights, or depths...
...OF} The American Spectator • November 1997 79...
...Well," Bernard growled, "there's always the question of my knighthood...
...One morning a very proper acquaintance found Bernard on a park bench, shivering, hungover, and waiting for the pubs to open...
...And one of his many doctors remarked that Bernard's life was proof of the injustice of Nature...
...He was gray and wrinkled and looked about 80...
...I n 1988, writer Keith Waterhouse got the inspired idea to craft a play based on his columns, and used as a title the explanation given by the Spectator whenever their author was too drunk to write: Jeffrey Bernard Is Unwell...
...They became a fabulously popular double act, and Spectator market research showed that "Low Life" was the most popular feature in the magazine...
...being a s---," as his third wife put it, "is irresistible...
...He didn't get the paper for its politics, he answered insouciantly, only for the crossword and the cricket...
...It was embarrassing and I hated it," he recalled, "but the poufs bought me drinks and meals...
...Years later he would curse himself for having won his first bet on the horses, which gave him the idea that he could win every time...
...He married the first woman he'd bedded, years earlier, but was as unfaithful to her as he was faithful to the bottle...
...He had been a terror from the start...
...You were Monday...
...they made him think "there might be more to church than meets the mind...
...The colorful Bernard, who died four days after the princess, was widely considered the finest journalistic diarist of his generation...
...He won a loyal readership for his effortless style, as well as his natural sympathy for his readers, the small-time gamblers who believed they were just one clever bet away from retirement...
...Forster, Noel Coward, Lucian Freud, Louis MacNeice, and Tom Driberg...
...He and a crony had spent the after- horrible fear upon waking one afternoon noon in the many hospitality tents, and discovering that he was blind...
...John Osborne, the original Angry Young Man, compared him to Pepys and Boswell, and Graham Greene said that Bernard had never once bored him...
...Rather than slow his drinking, the steady income pushed it to new heights, or depths...
...Overnight, Jeffrey Bernard was famous and, after a lifetime of skipping out on the rent in the middle of the night, finally had himself a bit of money...
...But part of his charm was a total refusal to play by everyone else's rules...
...His friend suggested that one needed to be prepared, in case one met the Queen...
...He watched (Continued on page 79) The American Spectator • November 1997 65 Lives and Letters (Continued from page 65) her in amazement, and never saw the tree coming...
...Having watched a television program about religion, he wrote that he did not much care for it, but did appreciate the ample MARC CARNEGIE is correspondent-at-large for The American Spectator and lives in London...
...He was 32 years old, and had finally found his calling...
...It was a medical miracle that he had lasted so long...
...But by then his liquid life had caught up with him...
...She inquired what had happened...
...At the Daily Sketch one afternoon he threw up into his typewriter...
...The night before he was to interview Lord Leverhulme, he passed out with a lit cigarette and set fire to his only suit...
...What would he raise...
...Alexander Chancellor, Bernard's first editor at the Spectator, said that a typical day at his magazine began: 10.55 Arrive at office moo Lose article by Solzhenitsyn n.o5 To pub for gin and tonic A boozy lunch with Bernard once led another colleague to get sick in the restaurant, prompting a lady at a neighboring table to shriek in horror, "What's that...
...He met life the way most of us would like to—always on his own terms...
...His wit was legendary...
...Do you have any scotch in the house...
...With a skinful of booze in him Bernard suggested to the editor of Queen that the magazine ought to have a horseracing column, and was told, "You're quite right—do it...
...Eventually a writer pal convinced him, not without reason, that journalism was 64 November 1997 The American Spectator "the only thinkable alternative to working...
...he boomed...
...The youngest son of an architect father and an "opera singer who was by an itinerant pork butcher out of a gypsy," Bernard spent his childhood years throwing milk bottles at passers-by and setting fire to buildings...
...I ndeed, after interviewing Bernard's former colleagues of that time, his biographer concluded that most had then been so drunk that it was like trying to get them to summon up the Middle Ages...
...In 1976, at age 44, he got the assignment that would lead to his worldwide fame...
...By his mid-teens, when he gave up on school, or rather vice versa, Bernard had developed the dashing good looks that would ease him into the beds of some 500 women and, in the early years, some wealthy men as well...
...But money was hard to come by...
...fact he had passed out into his fish, and "There were lots of people standing his glasses were covered with tartar around," his pal recalled...
...Even in this company, Bernard's thirst was exceptional, and getting worse...
...What do I need a bloody hat for...
Vol. 30 • November 1997 • No. 11
